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The 30 Dumbest Video Game Titles In History
An anonymous reader writes "Not every game involves taking an axe to the head of a criminal; some classics from the 80's involved massacring camels from aircraft, or in the case of "How to Be a Complete Bastard" for the C64, something altogether different(unless you're a camel). CNet has collected the 30 most ridiculous game names and concepts from the last 25 years. Quite frankly, how some of these — including "Touch Dic" from Korea — ever made it onto store shelves is beyond me."
They are different - nothing wrong with ridiculous names.
...which I have yet to find again. (for C64)
/. crowd" you ask? Well, Q*bert-inspired gameplay wasn't modified much, so when penis touched/entered vagina (with a suggestive sound, as far as SID capabilities went) you actually...lost a life.
Basically it was a variant of Q*bert ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q*bert ) where Q*bert was replaced by representation of...penis and enemies by...yep, vaginas.
Why "perfect game for
PS. Frustrating that I can't seem to find it even using the title - Spermen (but I might remember that wrong)
One that hath name thou can not otter
I was a little surprised not to see that one up there.
Then again, it was kind of a pointless list to begin with.
http://caesar.logiqx.com/php/emulator_game.php?id=mame&game=mjegolf Mahjong Erotica Golf.
BULLSHIT! ZOMBIES ATE MY NEIGHBORS IS A GREAT GAME!
Seriously. I like that game. It has nice music too.
The article refers to its levels as being all essentially the same, but that's not really true. There aren't bosses at the end of levels either. I wonder if they actually played the game.
Atari 2600 during the depressed years of 83-84 when carts were being dumped. Someone decided to make a game without a name called,"Name This Game." Some other Slashdotter once said it was part of a contest that they never did.
God spoke to me.
They should make a list of dumb cheats, think it'd be even more amusing than the title names...
I think it was fifteen years ago I last played New Zealand Story, but I'll never forget the cheat.
Since it's a little vulgar I'll just link the cheat code.
So those f*heads have training software! Damn.
Should have known. Explains why they're all the same.
Why is that game on the list? What exactly is ridiculous about the name or the concept? I've played and enjoyed it, by the way.
i've seen lits about bad titles before (don't remember if it was on slashdot)
one thing i do remember was Devine Divinity being in the list for redundant redundancy
The game title might sound odd but its based off a book of the same name.
... that should have been included, IMO:
- Brad Zoom in "Better Dead than Alien"
- Attack Of The Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens From Mars (starring Zippo the Dog)
Especially the second (a Spectrum game) is worth mentioning.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
OMG, I hate these stories that are split up on several pages with no possibility to display it on a single page (on halfway decent sites it hides nehind a link saying "print"...). Newsflash to site editors: I can't see your stupid ads anyways, I use Adblock! Would you please save me the hassle of clicking through tiny fractions of your article?
Ah, heh, it's just the mandatory "Top X Worst Y" kind of list, that became popular in the last half a decade or so. You know, so they can show they're hip, smack-talking, unbiased and irreverent like that, and aren't afraid to say it when a game sucked 20 years ago. (Although your mileage may vary a lot if it's a game from this year and from a major publisher.) It's the videogame reviewer version of building up street cred.
On the bright side, at least these guys don't talk too much smack. I've seen too many other such list which sound like the stereotypical pimple-faced 15 year old trying to sound like a wigger gangsta. They get brownie points for not doing that.
On the less bright side, it's as stupid and grasping at straws as any other such list. If you get past the first page, it becoes a lot more hit and miss, and more miss than hit. I'm kinda at a loss to see what's wrong with some of those names. Or why they are worse than a couple thousand other games from that era.
E.g., "Gun Club" may not be the most exciting name or concept, but it's neither stupid nor ridiculous. Plus, it doesn't sound any worse than any other shooting gallery kind of game, so no idea why they singled that one out.
E.g., "Chemist Tycoon" may get extra penalty points for being yet another attempt to cash in on the "tycoon" title. (Personally I'm still waiting for someone to come up with Battlefield Tycoon, and cash in on both;) But honestly it doesn't sound any worse than, say, Shopping Centre Tycoon, Restaurant Tycoon (if I recall its title right) or the two dozen other Tycoon games.
I mean, if you think running a chemist's shop is stupid, picture a buggy simulation of running a restaurant, plus a heavy-handed attempt at a story: that you're fighting to save the world from someone who cornered the market by having cheap prices and good quality. No, seriously, it's not even my interpretation of it, you have the "quest giver" (so to speak) tell you exactly that. So you're fighting to make the world safe again for overpriced and poor quality restaurant owners again, I guess.
E.g., "How To Be A Complete Bastard" may be morally questionable (but then they don't have a problem with GTA too?), but it sounds like it describes the game's content perfectly. And they endorse it as an old game to check out, so it can't have been that dumb a game idea either. As a sidenote, they're also wrong that no similar game has been made ever since. Check out Neighbours From Hell from Jowood.
E.g., "Barbie Horse Adventures" doesn't sound all that exciting for an adult, but, here's the important part, it's a game for little girls. It's not supposed to be Return To Castle Rammstein... err... Wolfenstein. Now I'll give them some slack there, because truly most games for little kids are an abomination, and those for little girls doubly so. But still, I'm curious, is there any reason to single out Barbie Horse Adventures there? I can think of a dozen titles along similarly silly premises for kids, and those didn't seem to make the list. Some even, yes, about riding a pony or caring for a pony. Was Barbie Horse Adventures that much dumber than those? I'm genuinely curious. Or is it something about Barbie that makes that concept dumber than usual?
E.g., Ship Simulator, well, it might not sound that exciting as a concept, but it's also not the worst. Perhaps more importantly, it's not there just because some devs were too retarded to come up with a better game concept. It's actually a training program that only incidentally also got sold as a video game.
But if we're going to include that and Bus Driver, how about Der Planner 3. It's also a training program, only this time for business. And not only it got published as a game, but also got saddled with some of the most uninspired things in history, to make it more game-like. Like it got a sorta Sims-like "at home" mode, except it missed all the points that Sims fans liked in The Sims. Plus a wife which could d
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A friend told me about a "great" game called Nexuiz. "It's the best game ever, based on Quake 1 etc".
My immediate thought was that Nexuiz is such a crap name, who came up with this word, did they use a random word generator?
And then I played it and realised that it was an average FPS, pretty graphics for those who might be impressed and some entertaining players.
Some of the Nexuiz weapons are equally dumb, an instant hit sniper weapon that is available on every map and an odd weapon that randomly fires purple - which never hits.
Nexuiz is a dumb name for an indifferent game.
There was only one title from (gaming genius) Jeff Minter: Attack of the Mutant Camels. Personally I think Megagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time or Sheep in Space would have been better examples of his unconventional naming style. As some have already pointed out some of the game names that made the list make perfect sense when taken in context.
How appealing does "fried green tomatoes" as a movie title sound?
The author's language (and choice of titles, and sense of humor in most of the entries) is full of fail.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Mega Man.
'30 worst articles ever posted to Slashdot' list.
The dumbest title I've seen in awhile is Space Rangers 2: Rise of the Dominators. That's the kind of thing TV/Movie writers come up with when they try to think of a fake software title.
Clovis
^ Clovis, look! It's that guy you are!
Look at how they come up with them.
As time went by I got a C64, but never did find myself "keeping up" and going to the Amiga. I always thought that Leisure Suit Larry was a great name for a game, but never got to play it.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
So, this game Space Marines? Part of the lame farm. But I have an awesome new video game that I have invented, and I call it ... Cobras vs. Chimps!
Penn and Teller once had a game produced, "Desert Bus", in response to complaints that video games were too violent.
The player gets to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph. The game cannot be paused. The bus contains no passengers. The road is empty. Nothing happens. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they score one point. Then a supervisor characters shows up and says "You want to pull a double shift?" The player can then drive back to Tucson. On the return trip, it slowly gets dark. That's it.
If you run off the road, the bus stalls, and eventually a tow truck shows up and tows the bus back to the starting point. In real time.
Somebody got six points once. This is believed to be the record.
Adrian Edmondson (From "The Young Ones" TV show) wrote a funny little book called "How be a complete bastard" and this game is an obvious tie-in. I still have that book somewhere and I expect it is still funny and worth reading, unlike this shitty cnet article.
Totally! You'd be in charge of managing the operations and finances of a mercenary outfit, like Executive Outcomes, Inc. or Blackwater.
You have to deal with the financial and tactical quandaries of supplying private military force to questionable wars in unstable parts of the world, but also cope with employee attrition and manage the moral quandaries and public outrage that comes with being a mercenary organization. The more questionable the conflict, the better the pay!
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
I see your point about "Prison Tycoon", and it's a fine specimen indeed. Definitely worth thinking about.
;)
But, just to give a couple more examples of dumb or ridiculous Tycoon games, and how abused _that_ name has got over the years, picture:
- Rotlicht Tycoon. (Red Light Tycoon.) Yep, it's about running a brothel. I'm guessing you wouldn't buy that for your kids either
- Klo Tycoon. (Toilet Tycoon) Yep, you're running a public toilet in that one.
I swear I'm not making either of those up.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Going purely on title - not content - Final Fantasy sequels have to be the most retarded titles in existence.
Each new iteration negates all previous ones by virtue of the fact that they weren't final. The tagline is going to have to be "Final Fantasy XIV - this time we mean it! No more fantasies from here on out. Maybe. OK, one more after this." Followed by Final "Fantasty XV - It's a full blown addiction. We just don't know how to stop ourselves. Please Help."
Take off every 'sig' for great justice.
> Nothing happens.
You're being totally unfair to the game! How could you leave out the bug splat? It's the most exciting thing in the whole game!
Mattel made "Frogs & Flies" for the Atari 2600 and I believe the Intellivision. Two frogs on lilypads, catching flies with their tongues. Playable if you were smoking oregano-sprinkled banana peels.
While the gameplay itself wasn't that bad, Karateka meets Slime World, Atari put out "Kung Food" for the Lynx. You're a green guy trying to get out of the refrigerator. The death scenes were hilarious.
You can't forget the promotional perk products for the Atari 2600, "Tooth Protectors" and "Chase The Chuckwagon", themed after Johnson & Johnson toothpaste and Ralston-Purina dogfood respectively. Proof that games patterned after consumer products are slightly dumber than games patterned after movies.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Probably not such a bad game (for the time) but the dialogs are hilarious...
"Rampant ninja related crimes these days... White House is not the exception..."
"The President has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the President?"
No sig for the moment.
I recall a game from the late '80s entitled "If It Moves, Shoot It" from Broderbund... which, if you do a casual Google search you will also discover a much better list of The 50 Worst Video Game Names of All Time then the one in the original post. I'm just glad it made #2.
The game itself was entertaining, if you like vertical-scrolling games like Xevious.
Zombies ate my neighbors was awesome.
I can't get past the name of Iggy's Wrecking Balls (N64).
http://ign64.ign.com/objects/002/002272.html
http://www.tomandemily.com
How To Be A Complete Bastard caused a minor furore in the UK after it was included on the cover-mount cassette of Amstrad Action magazine in the late eighties - it was the complete game and the magazine had a wide audience of children... I would have been 7 or 8 at the time and it was quite odd to be playing a game about farting and pissing!
Touch Dic is a great choice for unintentional double entendres, but my absolute favourite is the Japanese-only Saturn game 6 Inch Maidarin - a.k.a. Six Inch My Darling. I've never played it and I hope never to, because that title is just simply too great to ruin by contextualizing it.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
You forgot "...you insensitive clod!"
whilst the game is luke-warm for adults, it's a fun game for kids so long as you don't have to explain the overdose of innuendo! The comedy value is quite good, with on-screen comments like "mow my meadow" and "peel my plums": they don't mean much to my four year old, but I have to admit to a schoolboy snigger!
Spanky's Quest *smirk*, Frogger: Helmet Chaos *snigger*
What are these guys, like 13 or something?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
For the life of me, I can't figure out why they titled it "ZERO WING" instead of the obvious "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!" :)
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
http://www.spatch.net/games/play.cgi?game=putpbad
I admit I've never played the game or seen it played, but from reviews on TV I get the impression that this title (which suggests some sort of extreme violence) is actually about ogling girls in skimpy bikinis performing assorted outdoor activities.
You criticize the list for being predictable yet you fall into the predictable rebuttal "But what about X!?". Obviously there are other candidates for any list and they are matters of opinion but, try to get your mind around this, THEY ONLY HAVE A LIMITED NUMBER TO LIST. So don't whine about how they left out this or that, of course they didn't include everything.
Also, the list was focused not on how good a game was, necessarily, but how odd or stupid the title of the game sounded. "Touch Dic" may have been a great application but the name isn't exactly marketable in the US.
Come on, what about "MANHUNT"? "ACTRAISER"? "UNREAL"?
Got to be some of the worst titles ever.